The holiday season in an office setting is always an awkward time. You are not sure if you are supposed to give people gifts, or a card, or just ignore everything all together. Some people you work with become true friends, others you come to despise more than you could ever imagine, and then there are others that you kinda forget are even there. Those are the ones you need to watch out for.
I took a hard line when I entered the corporate world that I wouldn’t get anyone a present. First of all, most anything cheap you give your coworkers is probably ephemeral junk that will end up in the trash, second of all I have a hard enough time remembering to get stuff for my family than to worry about people I’m paid to be with. But no matter what, or where you work, there’s going to be that person that gives you something, and then you have to deal with it.
One year I was minding my own business and a lady that I barely knew came up to me and presented me with a dense and zesty smelling gift bag. Thing is, she only gave it to me, not the other people around me. I guess I had made some impression on her. I open the gift bag and find a ziplock bag filled to the brim with...meatballs, with a smudged label that read ‘Famous Spicy Meatballs. I was overcome with confusion and apprehension at this oddly specific gift that was only bestowed upon me. I tend to overthink. I could have gone down a rabbit hole contemplating why I was chosen for this gift, instead I put the bag in my car, out of sight, out of mind, and repressed the memory altogether.
The next day this lady corners me in the hall and asks me if I enjoyed her ‘famous spicy meatballs’. I lied to her and said they were delicious. So spicy, so meaty. She goes on and on about how its a tradition of hers to make meatballs around the holidays, and on and on and on. Any normal person would probably have felt bad at that point but I have an extreme phobia of eating food made by anyone that I do not trust and put through a very specific vetting process.
Around the same time this happened, I managed to charm a feral cat to stay in our yard and chase squirrels and roll around in the dirt. We had a contract. I fed the cat, and it protected our yard from vermin. When it got cold though, the cat broke the contract and started sleeping in our garage. I never put that in the contract, and every morning when I would leave for work it would scare me, then I would spill coffee on myself because I’m so jumpy. I would then chase the cat off and close the garage making sure it couldn’t get back in.
One morning as I was leaving I noticed the cat in the bushes shivering. I felt bad for it and got out to give it a pet and my eye caught the gift bag. I had totally forgotten about the famous spicy meatballs. It had probably been two weeks so they were undoubtedly good and fermented...but cats eat all kinds of stuff so it’d probably like this little treat. I opened the famous spicy meatball bag and dumped the entire greasy contents in my driveway and left.
When I got home I noticed the meatballs were gone. Poor thing must have been hungry. Then I opened the garage and the cat shot out like a rocket across the street. I was met with a scene permanently etched into my mind. Somehow this cat had managed to get back into my garage after ingesting the famous spicy meatballs and turned the entire room into an abstract expressionist’s dream studio. Jackson Pollock himself could not have made a better splatter painting if he were sober. My wife was livid, she hated the cat in the garage more than I did. I would like to think she is to blame for letting the cat back into the garage that morning but I was the one that fed it the famous spicy meatballs so it was my fault regardless.
It took me hours to clean up that mess in the freezing cold. I must have gone through ten rolls of paper towels and dry heaved so much I pulled a muscle in my chest. I didn’t feel bad about that. No. The thing I really felt bad about was the cat. What had I done to that poor protector of vermin? I will never know. The cat never returned.